Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

  “Imlay!” Mary protested, shocked. “You are not polite.”

  Imlay’s face, already glowing from the fire and his dinner, grew a shade more crimson.

  “I am very sorry, my dear, but this is important.”

  “My business was with Thomas Paine,” said Nathan. He wondered if this was wise. “And I cannot leave him to rot in prison.”

  “No more can we,” said Mary firmly. “You are too concerned with commerce, my dear,” she chided Imlay gently.

  “It is commerce that pays the bills,” he snapped and Nathan saw her flinch as if he had struck her. Imlay flung himself down in a chair.

  “What are they doing arresting Paine? He is an American citizen. A friend of Washington.” He looked at Nathan as if it was his fault. “Unless it is this ‘business’ of yours.”

  The thought had occurred to Nathan but he resented hearing it from Imlay. Was the man drunk? It was entirely possible.

  “I had better return to Paris,” he said, rising to his feet. He turned apologetically to Mary who looked ready to burst into tears.

  “Oh sit down, man, sit down.” Imlay flapped a hand at him. “I am sorry if I have vexed you. I am out of sorts. It is this blasted cargo. I cannot let it rot in Le Havre. And if you cannot go with me, then I must go by myself.”

  “Well, the ship’s mate has the bill of lading,” Nathan assured him coldly. “He is perfectly capable of loading five hundred chests of tobacco into a few barges.”

  Imlay looked across at his wife, sitting at the far side of the fireplace. “I am sorry, my dear,” he said, though he sounded more exasperated than regretful, “but I fear I must go, just for a few days.”

  “Then go,” she said, her face white. “We will have to manage our affairs without you.”

  “Do not, I beg of you, do anything foolish while I am away.”

  “What could I possibly do,” she inquired, “tucked away here in Neuilly like a little mouse?”

  And Nathan caught a glimpse of the old Mary that had been the terror of London.

  He viewed the prison across the frozen gardens, a vast, sprawling Renaissance chateau with a sprinkling of snow on its soaring abundance of turrets and rooftops. It had been built early in the seventeenth century for Marie de Medici, widow of the murdered King Henry IV, and even with its boarded and shuttered windows it retained elements of Renaissance grandeur, though it suggested to Nathan more the castle of an ogre than the palace of a queen. And now it was a prison, though the only physical barrier preventing a closer approach to the walls appeared to be a wrought-iron railing about seven or eight feet high tipped with fleurs-de-lis. There were sentry boxes at intervals but no sentries that they could see. Perhaps they were inside keeping warm.

  He heard shouts and looked back. Alex had made a snowball and hurled it at his mother and now she was trying to scrape up enough to throw back at him. She appeared very young—and happy. She caught his eye and looked a little sheepish. They were not supposed to look happy with Thomas Paine in the Luxembourg and Mary risking her own safety by visiting him there.

  They walked on beside the lake with its frozen fountain and its sepulchral statues. They seemed to be the only human figures in the frozen landscape and Nathan felt exposed to the gaze of hidden watchers high in the palace turrets. The gardens were open to the public but not many people went there these days, Sara had warned him, and it was wise not to stop and stare. Then they entered an avenue of chestnut trees flanking the west wing and saw a small crowd at the far end just outside the railings.

  “They are friends or relatives of the prisoners.” Sara had dropped her voice, though only the trees could have heard her. “There is a large room—a gallery—on the upper floor with windows overlooking the gardens and the prisoners are allowed to walk there about this time of day.”

  Nathan wondered how she came to know so much about the interior of the prison and its workings but kept the thought to himself. The crowd was composed mainly of women and children, huddling in the cold like mourners at a funeral. Two guards stared stonily back at them from inside the railings.

  “We should not go too close,” warned Sara. “There will almost certainly be policemen or informers among them.”

  “How long will they wait?”

  “Oh, hours sometimes. It is quite wretched to see them, the children especially, stretching out their hands to their fathers inside the prison.”

  They turned off along another path that led back out on to the streets. Most of the snow had gone from here or turned to slush and the light was fading. They waited in a small café in the Rue Medici where they had arranged to meet Mary and drank hot chocolate and ate small honey cakes. Nathan paid. People were starving in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, it was said, but you could still eat and drink well in Paris if you had money. The trick was not to dress as if you did. He wore his greatcoat and his knitted Breton hat with the tricolour pinned firmly to the side.

  “Are you a sailor?” asked Alex through a mouthful of cake.

  “Yes,” said Nathan, after considering a moment and finding no apparent danger in the admission.

  “Where is your ship?”

  “In Le Havre.”

  “Did you sail it from America?”

  “I did,” Nathan lied. He thought he saw Sara look sharply at him. Had Mary told her he was from England? He avoided her eye for the moment.

  “I would like to go to America. My father was a soldier in America. He fought against the English. Did you fight against the English?”

  “No. I was too young,” Nathan told him.

  Was he? He tried to work it out. But of course he was. All these lies were unsettling him.

  “I would like to fight against the English.”

  “Alex, please do not speak with your mouth full.”

  Nathan smiled at her but she did not smile back and her eyes were guarded. Happily the door opened and Mary swept in looking flushed and excited.

  “Villains,” she said, hurling herself into an empty chair.

  “Would they not let you see him?” Sara kept her voice low.

  “Oh, I saw him.” She shook her head fiercely. “He is in a damp cell, below ground level, with water streaming down the walls and no fire. No fire or even any light, not so much as a candle.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Sara warned her glancing about the café. It was practically empty and the proprietor was watching them from the bar.

  “They let you into his cell?”

  “No. There is a visiting room. But he told me what it is like.”

  “How is he?” Nathan asked her.

  “How do you think in those conditions? He looks like death. I complained to the governor.”

  “You saw the governor?”

  “Well, his assistant. I said he is an American citizen and a representative of the National Convention and they dare to treat him like a common criminal.”

  “What did he say?” Sara seemed amazed. Clearly this was a side of Mary she had not seen before.

  “He said it was a temporary measure until they received the papers from the Police Bureau. Then they would move him to a proper cell. But he seemed shaken when I said he was a friend of George Washington.”

  “Is he a friend of George Washington?”

  “Well, Imlay says so.” She shrugged. Nathan gathered that she did not regard this as the firmest of endorsements. “I said he has committed no crime, broken no laws and was imprisoned for one reason only—to prevent him from writing about the crimes against liberty.”

  Their expressions reflected a degree of concern.

  “Well, someone has to tell them.”

  Nathan could understand why she and his mother had seemed to get on so well.

  “They said he was imprisoned under the Law of Suspects. Ha. A
re you rich?” she demanded of Nathan, though she might have been addressing the entire café by the volume of her voice. “You must be cheating the state. Suspect!”

  The proprietor looked up in alarm.

  “Are you poor? You must have sent your money out of the country. Suspect!”

  “Mary,” hissed Sara in horror. Two people got up and left the café.

  “Are you a recluse? You must have something to fear. Suspect! Are you cheerful? You must be celebrating a national defeat. Are you sad? The State of the Nation must depress you. Are you a philosopher, a writer or a poet? Suspect, suspect, suspect.”

  Nathan offered her the last cake.

  “Do you want a hot chocolate?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said, standing up. “We haven’t the time.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “I know where I am going. I am going to see the American Minister. You can come with me if you like. If you have had enough cake.”

  “So you are back in Paris,” the American Minister remarked to Nathan, as if it was a circumstance very much to be regretted.

  Gouverneur Morris was a tall, confident man of middling years with handsome if florid features, marred, to Nathan’s thinking, by the supercilious contours of his mouth. If it was a smile it was one that reflected the Minister’s good opinion of himself rather than anyone else in the world. His most dominant feature, however, was a wooden leg which gave him a certain piratical air, though Imlay said he lost it falling out of his carriage, drunk. It fitted into a kind of basket at the knee with straps attaching it to the thigh and as he leaned back in his armchair it pointed directly at Nathan’s groin, rather disconcertingly like a cannon or a swivel gun.

  They were in the library of his house in the Rue de la Planche with the curtains drawn and a fire lit. It might have been cosy but their welcome had not been as warm as Nathan might have wished. He and Mary Imlay sat side by side on the sofa while the Minister regarded them haughtily through the pince-nez that he kept on a silk ribbon round his neck.

  “I am only lately arrived,” Nathan told him, “from New York.”

  “And for what purpose on this occasion, if I may make so bold?”

  “The study of astronomy,” replied Nathan. “I am making a study of the works of Tycho Brahe in the Paris Observatoire.”

  He felt Mary’s stare but the Minister regarded him with a new interest.

  “Really? So you are a scholar, sir? Have you had anything published?”

  “An insignificant little paper on the mathematical relationship between the cube of a planet’s distance from the sun and the square of its orbital period.”

  “Really?” Morris appeared genuinely impressed.

  “And an article in the Harvard Science Review on Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus and the mathematical probability of there being another just behind it.”

  Mary cleared her throat and moved her foot next to his. He suspected that in a moment he would feel some pressure.

  “I am heartened that Paris continues to attract the attentions of a scholar and a gentleman,” Morris confided, “for all that her most accomplished citizens are led to the guillotine, or butchered by the mob and tossed into holes in the ground like dead dogs. Bailly, the previous mayor, was an astronomer, I recall, with an international reputation, but it did not save him from losing his head.”

  He sighed and Mary cleared her throat but he had not finished.

  “Ah Paris, how she bleeds. Art is gone. The dancers are gone. The modistes are gone. Paris is left to the mercy of the provinces for its fashions whence come little bonnets trimmed with yellow flowers.” He pulled a face as if a quantity of bile had been stirred. “Only the theatres appear to thrive. I wonder if that is significant, the national temperament being somewhat inclined to drama? And duelling, I believe, is more popular than ever, being no longer confined to the quality. The morning procession of cabs to the Bois de Boulogne resembles that of the tumbrels in the afternoon, I am told, and produces almost as many corpses. Yes, Paris does its best to divert us from more serious pursuits. One goes to one’s club to murder a little time. I have seen enough to convince me that a man might be incessantly occupied in this city for forty years and grow old without knowing what in the least he has been about.”

  “Thomas Paine,” Mary said at last, recalling him to the purpose of their visit.

  “Paine.” The American Minister closed his eyes and gripped the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb as if the source of his discomfort had taken up residence there and could not be dislodged. “I cannot tell you how that man has plagued me since he came to France.”

  “I am sure it is to be regretted,” agreed Mary. “However, he is now incarcerated in the Luxembourg and . . .”

  “Do you know why he came here in the first place?”

  “I understood,” said Mary, “that it was to assist the cause of Revolution.”

  “In fact it was to build a bridge.”

  Nathan thought he meant in the metaphysical sense but no, he meant a real bridge.

  “He fancies himself as an engineer as well as a philosopher. Building bridges is his forte. Indeed he offered to build one for me once—across the Harlem River, where we maintain a modest estate. He said it would increase the traffic to New York and we might charge a toll. We thanked him politely but declined and I fear he took it amiss. And so he became a Revolutionist.”

  He addressed Nathan. “You are familiar with his works, sir?”

  As if they were the Devil’s . . . Nathan had seen both volumes of The Rights of Man on the Minister’s bookshelves beside the works of Rousseau and Voltaire but they were books that might be found in the library of any gentleman with pretensions to learning.

  “I am,” he confirmed. Mary made a small noise of disgust.

  “ ‘America is to be the hope of mankind,’ ” Morris quoted satirically. “ ‘A safe haven from which the friends of liberty might pour forth and spew . . .’ ”

  “ ‘Spread their campaign for free and equal citizenship around the world,’ ” Mary completed the quotation accurately in acid tones.

  “Indeed.” Morris arched his eyebrows at her. “I had forgot you are an educated woman, Mrs. Imlay. I wonder if the French were as well informed when they elected him to the National Convention. I am inclined to doubt it. One of his first speeches—he hardly speaks a word of French but it does not prevent him from making speeches, alas—was to call for the abolition of slavery. This did not go down at all well. In fact I doubt it would have been more coldly received in Virginia. You appear bemused, madam. Yes, you might think the Revolutionists would oppose slavery but without slaves they would have no coffee, sugar or tobacco. Life would be even more insupportable than it is already. So Paine was not so popular of a sudden. People began to call him Tom le Fou. ‘Tom Fool’ or ‘Mad Tom’ like the English. Tom o’ Bedlam. Then he opposed the execution of the King. Another surprise, given his views on monarchy. He would take his crown but not his head. He is not a sanguine man, our Thomas, whatever else might be said about him. He wished to have the King banished to America. With his entire family. He proposed that Congress should purchase a farmhouse for them somewhere near Philadelphia and that I should escort them thither. You smile, madam. Have I said something amusing?”

  “Your pardon, sir, it was the image of the King and Queen of France on a farm in America.”

  “If it were that or the guillotine you might not consider it such a poor choice, madam,” he snapped. “Unhappily it was not a choice they were given.”

  He looked away into the fire and by its glow Nathan saw his eyes were moist. Morris and Marie Antoinette had become close friends, Imlay had said, and perhaps more.

  “It is partly because he spoke up for them in the Convention,” Mary reminded him, “that Mr. Paine is n
ow in prison. The very least we can do, I would have thought, is to make a strenuous protest on his behalf to the French Foreign Ministry.”

  Morris regarded her coldly. “The reason Mr. Paine is in prison is that the present rulers of France entertain hopes of American aid in the war against England. They need American grain and American tobacco and,” he waved a hand airily, “whatever else is grown in America. They do not wish this notorious troublemaker to poison the Congress against them.”

  “I would not have thought that it would recommend the present rulers of France to the American people that they have imprisoned its greatest philosopher and a hero of the American Revolution,” Mary pointed out.

  Morris sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. He did not look at all well, Nathan thought. Imlay said he was a martyr to the gout and was often to be seen with his right foot swathed in bandages, which given the absence of its neighbour seemed especially unfortunate.

  “Perhaps a letter to the Foreign Minister,” Mary persisted, “reminding him that Thomas Paine is an American citizen and a friend of President Washington.”

  Morris frowned, shaking his head.

  “It would do no good,” he said. “No good at all. The Foreign Minister has no influence whatsoever. You might as well appeal to the ticket clerk at the Comédie-Française.”

  “Then what is your advice, sir?” she demanded coldly.

  “My advice, madam, is to wait upon events and trust that the French authorities will come to recognize Mr. Paine’s worth as a philosopher.”

  “And if they condemn him as an enemy of the people?”

  “Then I trust he will find comfort in philosophy.”

  Nathan emerged from the Palais de Justice with a permis de passage extending his leave to remain in Paris until the end of the month. He had used the story he had given Morris: that he was studying the astronomical works of Tycho Brahe in the Paris Observatoire and needed more time for his research. Although this had occurred to him without much thought, it seemed singularly appropriate as a reason to stay in Paris, for Brahe had been the protégé of Marie de Medici, the chatelaine of the Luxembourg.